Chris Larson Rebuilt a House by Marcel Breuer Only to Destroy It

Video The artist Chris Larson built a life-sized replica of Marcel Breuer’s St. Paul house. Early Sunday, Mr. Larson set the piece ablaze in downtown St. Paul before a crowd of onlookers.

Caroline Yang for The New York Times

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

June 9, 2013

ST. PAUL — At 2:15 a.m. Sunday, Chris Larson set fire to Chad Bogdan’s home. Or something that looked a lot like it. The two-bedroom house was unoccupied at the time. Mr. Larson had just finished assembling it a few hours earlier, on a vacant lot.

No apparent rancor existed between the men. Mr. Larson, a 46-year-old art professor at the University of Minnesota, had recently discussed the sale of an original drawing to Mr. Bogdan, 40, an industrial design executive.

When the fire started, Mr. Bogdan was milling about in a crowd of thousands outside the Union Depot, along the Mississippi riverfront. The mood was festive: A ragtag pep squad marched by humming “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on kazoos. It was the night of the dusk-to-dawn cultural frolic called Northern Spark. And for this year’s edition, arson was the main event.

First, a tube of smoke spiraled out of the house. A moment later, the roof was on fire. By the time the walls started collapsing, the conflagration may have been close to 2,000 degrees, or so said the guy on the fire truck, and he should know.

The building shouldn’t have burned so quickly. It was one of about 100 homes drafted by the well-known Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, who later designed the Whitney Museum of American Art. And as a matter of taste, he had specified incombustible materials: white concrete block for the walls, red ceramic tile for the floors.

But Mr. Larson had cut some corners when he was following the original 1961 blueprints. He had made the walls and roof out of cardboard and two-by-four studs. Working with a crew of two laborers, a country-western singer and an erstwhile horoscope writer, he had completed the building in a month.

Once the scene ended, Mr. Bogdan said he planned to enjoy a few slugs of club soda and “potato juice” (presumably vodka). He had adopted a stoic line. “At the beginning, I took it personally,” he said of the fire. “But this has nothing to do with me.”

It was late. Soon he would be bundling his wife and older son into their Land Rover and returning — get this — to the same white house, a few miles downriver.

To be clear, there were two Breuer houses, identical twins: a 50-year-old exemplar of high modernism and a stunt double that Mr. Larson had devised for the night’s bonfire. The first was intact and standing where Mr. Bogdan had left it earlier that evening. The second, as everyone could see, was on its way to becoming ash.

Something profoundly weird had just happened. Lacking another word, Mr. Bogdan called it art. Why had someone chosen to clone such a distinguished home only to destroy it?

Earlier in the evening, Mr. Larson’s response to the crowd’s pressing question had been to hide inside the house. His wife, Kriss Zulkosky, explained that this wasn’t the first piece of art he had set fire to. Now and again, he burned his own hand-hewn sculptures — gargantuan and monstrous machines — in the backyard. Friends would drop by for beer and barbecue.

“It’s a gesture,” Mr. Larson said, in a tidy bit of understatement.

Then he expanded a little on the nature of material. The shiny, finished object, be it a car or a mansion, was inert, tedious to the eye, dead. Demolition freed up the energy trapped in the materials. “There’s some potential in that action,” he said.

Mr. Larson could have been paraphrasing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (“The death of fire is birth for air”) or just exercising his tongue. Pressing him to explain why he creates and obliterates houses ultimately seemed like asking the photographer Cindy Sherman why she takes so many pictures of herself. It’s what he does.

So let the building tell the story.

Marcel Breuer’s little white box had a colorful history before Mr. Larson ever got his hands on the blueprints. Breuer, a Jewish émigré from Hungary, sketched the house as a favor to a Catholic liturgical artist and future monk named Frank Kacmarcik. The pair had collaborated on the glorious Abbey Church and 2,500-ton concrete bell banner, at Saint John’s University, 75 miles northwest of the Twin Cities.

The architectural historian Larry Millett included the Kacmarcik house in his magisterial “AIA Guide to the Twin Cities,” but he also possesses an intimate acquaintance with Breuer’s blockhouse brutalism. “I went to Saint John’s,” he said. “And I lived in Breuer’s dorms, which I believe were designed to mortify the flesh.”

The austere house in St. Paul is cut from a similar cloth, Mr. Millett said — that being, perhaps, a hair shirt. “You have to be someone who likes that rather minimalist aesthetic,” he said. “It’s not a bright, deeply colorful house.”

The original design program, as specified by Mr. Kacmarcik, was unapologetically spartan. “I would be very happy if this could be conceived very basically, a barn to live in, with the simplest solutions possible,” he wrote at the time.

Breuer complied. By the time he drafted rough plans for Mr. Kacmarcik’s residence, the Bauhaus virtuoso had already completed major projects like the Unesco headquarters in Paris. A 2,000-square-foot house was a minor distraction. He waived his firm’s fee.

And yet to his client, the house represented a major investment. “I realize these requests are much like that which would be characteristic of a lord of a manor,” he wrote to the architect. “But my budget is for a tent.”

At least the house, which sits on nearly two acres of secluded bluff land, enjoyed what a real estate agent might call a million-dollar view. From the windows at the end of each room, you can see Pig’s Eye Lake, the Mississippi River Valley and the skylines of St. Paul and Minneapolis, a dozen miles away.

Paradoxically, this elevation also means that one of the best-pedigreed homes in the area can rarely be seen from anywhere but a river barge — not a convenient stop on a parade of homes.

Mr. Bogdan spotted the Breuer house almost by chance: the corner of a white box, peeking above the green tree canopy. A design job, managing the outdoor living line at Target, had brought him and his family from Chelsea to the wilds of St. Paul. “It was weird that it was in our neighborhood,” he said, a month before the big burn. “I wanted to know who the architect was.”

Mr. Kacmarcik had long since decamped to the Benedictine monastery at Saint John’s, and the current owner was an architecture curator, Christopher Monkhouse (a surname that must be proof of divine intervention). Mr. Bogdan left an anonymous fan note in the mailbox.

Kate Bogdan, 38, was sitting next to her husband on the comfortably stuffed sofa, revising his timeline as he spoke. “You were totally stalking it before you wrote the letter,” she said.

Mr. Bogdan admitted, “Yeah, I was stalking it.”

He was in London on business the day the call came. Mr. Monkhouse was moving to Chicago and the house would be going on the market.

Ms. Bogdan said, “I was excited to tell him.”

Her husband countered: “But you were cool. It was like, ‘I heard from your stalker house, and you’re never going to guess who the architect is.’ I could tell it was going to be big.”

Vindication! His eye had attracted him to the genuine article: a Breuer design. “Sometimes I’d drive by before work and after work,” he said.

How many times?

“Dozens,” he said. “Sometimes I’d come sit in the backyard.”

He thought about this for a moment, then said, “That sounds so creepy.”

Ms. Bogdan nodded sympathetically. “It’s creepy, but it’s true. You had a relationship with the house.”

The couple bought the property in 2007 for $525,000. Cheap for a Breuer, but nonetheless a stretch to afford. And since they moved in, the home’s idiosyncrasies have not been easy on their finances. Every piece of replacement hardware seems to be nonstandard, and twice the usual price.

The spec list was part of a thick packet that Mr. Monkhouse left for the new owners: holiday letters between Mr. Breuer and Mr. Kacmarcik, site plans, blueprints. Mr. Bogdan shared these with Mr. Larson to make the reproduction possible.

And yet their relationship hadn’t started so well. While Mr. Larson was formulating the project, he had cased the empty house, taking some rough measurements. Rumor of the planned arson reached Mr. Bogdan before the two men spoke.

Mr. Bogdan admitted that he did not instantly understand Mr. Larson’s overtures. “I thought, why did he invite me to his studio? Is he going to beat me up or something?”

After having the artist and his wife to dinner, though, Mr. Bogdan discovered, “He’s such a lovely guy. He’s not a pyromaniac.”

Despite its heritage, the house has been neglected in books on Breuer. The burn presented the opportunity for the Bogdans to earn it some respect. Ms. Bogdan, a former event planner, catered a benefit party for Northern Spark, bringing a small flock of gallerists to tour the house.

The ascetic interior space may not ingratiate itself with you. But by now, their two boys, Jack, 9, and Will, 5, have formed a warm relationship with the cool concrete bunker. When the family recently toured an ornate Tudor Revival home, Jack was heard to declare, “It isn’t my type.”

Pressed by his father to elaborate, he said, “White is a good color for a house.”

Chris Larson’s studio occupies the back of a mattress warehouse, on a bland but busy commercial corridor, next to a dollar store and a beauty school. And the salvage stored within suggests that Mr. Larson has long taken an apocalyptic view toward architecture. Pry open an eight-foot crate and you can see the cedar facsimile that he built of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex. Another work, from 2004, titled “Pause,” crashed an 18-foot-long wood model of the General Lee (the ’69 Dodge Charger from “The Dukes of Hazzard”) into a replica of the Montana cabin of the Unabomber.

Yet Mr. Larson’s appetites go beyond destruction, to ritual and religion. Until a few years ago, he was the frontman for a country gospel group called the House of Mercy Band, with a steady gig at his church’s Sunday service.

For one installation, he coaxed a family gospel group, the Spiritual Knights, to pose around a formal dining table, recreating the cover of a Mahalia Jackson album, “Bless This House.” He then lodged the room (and the surrounding two-story house) on a pontoon platform and floated it across an empty lake. He borrowed the title of the piece, “Crush Collision,” from an 1896 publicity stunt, when a crowd of 30,000 flocked to the temporary city of Crush, Tex., to watch two locomotives collide. On impact, the steam boilers exploded, throwing shrapnel into the crowd and killing two.

The Breuer house, too, was meant to float — up the Mississippi, on two barges. Mr. Larson never expected the Northern Spark organizers to embrace the plan. “It seemed so absurd and outlandish,” he said.

A $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts buoyed his hopes. But after months of negotiations with barge-company executives, the Coast Guard and the fire department, the proposal hit rough water and sank.

At this point, Northern Spark offered to relocate his Norse funeral pyre to an empty lot outside the old rail station. This was just as well, as Mr. Larson had concluded his original plot was insane. “I didn’t realize the enormity of the scale,” he said.

He knew that he wanted to fashion each wall as a wood-and-cardboard panel. These units would need to come apart easily, like K’nex, and then snap back together on site. But he was accustomed to doing his carpentry without measurements. “If I’m off by an inch, I’m pretty good,” he said. “It’s kind of rogue architecture.”

Breuer’s plans, by contrast, were exacting. To execute them, Mr. Larson enlisted a friend from church, Forest Lewis, who published absurdist horoscopes when he wasn’t doing construction jobs like barn-raising.

A deeper riddle would be how far to take the finish to achieve verisimilitude. Mr. Larson imagined the reproduction looking like an architect’s foamcore model, blown up to actual size. But would it resemble a house? He started to realize, “All the small details are so important with Breuer.”

The critic Mr. Millett, who is writing a book on Minnesota’s midcentury homes, notes that “full-bore International Style houses tended to have antiseptic white exteriors and surfaces. Obviously there’s no ornament. The idea was to display volume rather than structure. It’s all about solids and voids.”

Put another way, even in its original form, the Breuer house looks like a couple of plain white boxes squashed together. The experience is to be inside the box and feel the geometry, sort of like moving through the torqued cylinders of the sculptor Frank Serra.

Is it healthy to exalt a house — the place where you cook linguine and fold laundry — as a piece of art?

One skeptic is Mr. Lewis, 32, the rare home remodeler who cites French cultural theory and delivers the occasional lay sermon. “There’s spectacle involved,” he said of the fire. “But because it’s the Breuer house” — that is, practically a holy shrine for shelter magazines — “I think it has to do with idolatry on some level.”

You could ogle the idealized images in a magazine, the way you would a Photoshopped supermodel, and Mr. Lewis confessed that he liked to do that sometimes. Or you could erect the cleanest, whitest dream home and then smash your idol.

Mr. Larson was planning something more than an ordinary house fire. He aspired to an inferno. To this end, he had hired a company called Hollywood Pyrotechnics Inc. to string up baggies full of denatured alcohol as an accelerant. And a custom print shop had donated a few tons of scrap paper (obsolete business cards, defective wedding invitations) to stuff the shell with kindling.

“I want to burn it so fast there’s no time to mourn it,” Mr. Larson said.

But then, for all the artist’s labors, it wasn’t his house. Mr. Bogdan had originally found it hard to get his head around annihilation. “It’s not a pleasant thing to see the capsule with everything that means the most to you in flames,” he said. But with a cup of potato juice for courage, and his wife and older son safe at hand, he declared himself ready.

A parade of onlookers circled the perimeter of the house for hours, in a kind of funeral procession, tapping on the cardboard walls and posing for trophy photos. But this crowd wasn’t exactly mourning the death of high modernism.

A typical heckler was Dr. Sarah Kesler, 42, of Minneapolis. “Thank God they’re going to burn it,” she said, “because it’s ugly and depressing. It’s a good example of a place I wouldn’t want to live in.”

You could say one man’s crowd is another man’s mob. For a time, Mr. Larson helped his crew of friends and art students slash diamond-shaped ventilation holes in the walls and ceiling. But before long, he was huddling in a small, enclosed chamber, or what would have been the mechanical room. “It feels really decadent,” he said. “I wish we could do it without the crowd.”

An assistant came by to ask where to stash the first wood pallets — more kindling. “Start in the kids’ bedroom,” he said, and then added, “That sounds awful.”

Mr. Larson retreated further into the chiaroscuro made by Breuer’s walls. “I just realized it’s like I’ve created my very own Crush Collision,” he said, referring to the railroad publicity stunt that turned into a catastrophe. The art had ended at seven o’clock when the final piece of cardboard went up on the wall. What remained, for Mr. Larson, was circus.

And so it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that at 2:15 a.m., Mr. Bogdan and his family were standing alone in the crowd on the train platform outside the depot, keeping the vigil for Breuer and what he had imagined. Mr. Larson had already pulled away in his black truck. He was thinking about going home, he said, or maybe to a bar.

By the time the fire department hosed down the embers around 3 a.m., Mr. Larson was safely back in his studio. There was a lot of potential in the new empty space.